How Video Increases Alignment between Marketing and Sales

To maintain pace in a modern B2B marketing environment, it has become crucial to think in terms of a full revenue cycle, from initial awareness to sales closed, instead of simply in terms of a sales cycle. The full revenue cycle requires both sales & marketing departments working together towards the same revenue goals.

For B2B marketers, there’s few channels more effective at solving marketing problems than video. The numbers speak for themselves: Need more traffic? Companies using video enjoy 41% more web traffic from search than non-users, and video drives a whopping 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines. Want to drive more leads? According to 70% of marketers, video produces more conversions than any other type of content. Want to enhance engagement? (For a more extensive list of stats on the benefits of video for B2B marketing, see our blog.) Our brains are hardwired to respond more fully to information presented in video. Then there’s 3D animation: Given the often technical nature of products and services in B2B industries, 3D animation provides a particularly useful tool for communication. Animated marketing videos enable companies to communicate more conceptual message that may be difficult to explain and illustrate in live capture. In short, video delivers results across multiple marketing functions and throughout the customer lifecycle. These are just a few reasons why video is the rising star of the marketing world.

Less known, however, are the benefits of using video to better align marketing and sales—a perennial challenge in many companies. Video is a powerful alternative to the traditional sales email, and is actually more effective. 59% of executives would rather watch video than read text, while four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it. And those video views aren’t just vanity metrics. Prospects who view videos of a product are 85% more likely to buy.

This shared success with video makes it a rare opportunity for collaboration. Sales and Marketing teams have grown much closer in recent years, but alignment remains a challenge in many B2B companies. Marketing produces valuable assets for the sales team to distribute, while Sales will request specific campaigns or promotions to help them reach more accounts. While this is certainly more collaborative than the old model, the information can still tend to flow in one direction at a time.

Video is one of many inbound marketing strategies that provides a critical opportunity for both departments to actively collaborate. (Also see our piece on how social media can support alignment between marketing and sales.) Two heads are better than one, and bringing the two teams together yields better results for a wide range of video assets. Shooting a new product demo? Sales reps have run a thousand demos and know the flow and structure that works the best. Filming a personal video for a prospect? Marketers can help craft the story and make sure it stands out. Holiday videos, company updates, feature overviews—the list of potential videos sales and marketing can collaborate on is endless.

While collaboration fosters better relationships and communication, it also has another positive externality at the executive level: It gives both departments a shared marker for success.

It’s hard to ever have two departments align if they are focused on achieving different things. A sales manager will never care about a brand’s Instagram following the same way a marketing manager will never care about a rep’s activity numbers. But with both departments using video, there’s a large area of overlap in mutual goals: Both departments care about views and engagement levels. Both departments are interested in any view drop-offs or areas of a video that are rewatched. And when a marketer talks about a video’s viewer retention, somebody on the sales team will know exactly what they’re talking about. Simply put, being on the same page for metrics allows sales and marketing to work together to improve them.

To learn more about how MarketScale supports the marketing goals of partnering clients, feel free to contact me or visit or our website.